Heaven's Prisoners (15 page)

The waitress arrived right behind her. She ordered a champagne cocktail. Her accent was northern. I watched her light a cigarette and blow smoke up into the air as though it were a stylised art.

“Has Toot been around lately?” I said.

“You mean the space-o boon?” she said. Her eyes had a smile in them while she looked abstractly at the bar.

“That sounds like him.”

“What are you interested in him for?”

“I just haven’t seen him or Eddie for a while.”

“You interested in girls?”

“Sometimes.”

“I bet you’d like a little piece in your life, wouldn’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“It you don’t get a little piece, it really messes you up inside, doesn’t it? It makes everything real hard for you.” She put her hand on my thigh and worked her fingers on my knee.

“What time is Eddie going to be in?”

“You’re trying to pump me, hon. That’s going to give me bad thoughts about you.”

“It’s just a question.”

Her lips made an exaggerated pout, and she raised her hand, touched my cheek, and slid it down my chest.

“I’m going to think maybe you’re not interested in girls, that maybe you’re here for the wrong reasons,” she said.

Then her hand went lower and hit the butt of the .45. Her eyes looked straight into mine. She started to get up, and I put my hand on top of her arm.

“You’re a cop,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter what I am. Not to you, anyway. You’re not in trouble. Do you understand that?”

The alcohol shine had gone from her eyes, and her face had the look of someone caught between fear and an old anger.

“Where’s Eddie?” I said.

“He goes to dogfights sometimes in Breaux Bridge, then comes in here and counts the receipts. You want some real trouble, get in his face, and see what happens.”

“But that doesn’t concern you, does it? You’ve got nothing to gain by concerning yourself with other people’s problems, do you? Do you have a car?”

“What?”

“A car.” I pressed her arm slightly.

“Yeah, what d’you think?”

“When I take my hand off your arm you’re going on your break. You’re going out the door for some fresh air, and you’re not going to talk to anybody, and you’re going to drive your car down the road and have a late supper somewhere, and that phone on the bar is not going to ring, either.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“Make your choice, hon. I think this place is going to be full of cops tonight. You want to be part of it, that’s cool.” I took my hand away from her arm.

“You sonofabitch.”

I looked at the front door. Her eyes went angrily over my face again, then she slid off the vinyl seat and walked to the bar, the backs of her legs creased from sitting in the booth, and asked the bartender for her purse. He handed it to her, then went back to washing glasses, and she went out a side door into the parking lot.

Ten minutes later the phone did ring, but the bartender never looked in my direction while he talked, and after he hung up he fixed himself a scotch and milk and then started emptying ashtrays along the bar. I knew, however, that I didn’t have long before her nerves broke. She was afraid of me or of cops in general, but she was also afraid of Eddie Keats, and eventually she would call to see if a bust or a shooting had gone down and try to make the best of her situation.

I had another problem, too. The next floor show was about to start, and the waitress was circling through the tables, making sure everyone had had his two-drink minimum. I turned in the booth and let my elbow knock the beer bottle off the table.

“I’m sorry,” I said when she came over. “Let me have another one, will you?”

She picked up the bottle from the floor and started to wipe down the table. The glow from the bar made highlights in her blond hair. Her body had the firm lines of somebody who had done a lot of physical work in her life.

“You didn’t want company?” she said.

“Not now.”

“Expensive booze for a dry run.”

“It’s not so bad.” I looked at the side of her face as she wiped the rag in front of me.

“It’s the wrong place for trouble, sugar,” she said quietly.

“Do I look like bad news?”

“A lot of people do. But the guy that owns this place really is. For kicks, he heats up the wires in that monkey’s cage with a cigarette lighter.”

“Why do you work here?”

“I couldn’t get into the convent,” she said, and walked away with her drink tray as though a door were closing behind her.

Later a muscular, powerful man came in, sat at the bar, had the bartender bring him a collins, and began shelling peanuts from a bowl and eating them while he talked to one of the hookers. He wore purple suede cowboy boots, expensive cream-colored slacks, a maroon V-necked terry-cloth shirt, and gold chains and medallions around his neck. His long hair was dyed blond and combed straight back like a professional wrestler’s. He took his package of Picayune cigarettes from his pants pocket and set it on the bar while he shelled peanuts from the bowl. He couldn’t see me because I was sitting far back in the gloom and he had no reason to look in my direction, but I could see his face clearly, and even though I had never seen it before, its details had the familiarity of a forgotten dream.

His head was big, the neck as thick as a stump, the eyes green and full of energy; a piece of cartilage flexed behind the jawbone while he ground peanuts between his back teeth. The tanned skin around his mouth was so taut that it looked as if you could strike a kitchen match on it. His hands were big, too—the fingers like sausages, the wrists corded with veins. The hooker smoked a cigarette and tried to look cool while he talked to her, watching the red tracings of her cigarette in the bar mirror, but whenever she replied to him her voice seemed to come out in a whisper.

However, I had no trouble hearing his voice. It sounded like there was a blockage in the nasal passages; it was a voice that didn’t say but told things to people. In this case he was telling the hooker that she had to square her tab, that she was juicing too much, that the Jungle Room wasn’t a trough where a broad got free soda straws.

I said earlier I didn’t have a plan. That wasn’t true. Every drunk always has a plan. The script is written in the unconscious. We recognise it when the moment is convenient.

I slipped sideways out of the vinyl booth. I almost drank from the filled beer glass before I did. In my years as a practicing alcoholic I never left an unemptied glass or bottle on a table, and I always got down that last shot before I made a hard left turn down a one-way street. Old habits die hard.

I took down one of the cues from the wall rack by the entrance to the poolroom. It was tapered and made of smooth-sanded ash and weighted heavily at the butt end. He didn’t pay attention to me as I walked toward him. He was talking to the bartender now, snapping peanut shells apart with his thick thumb and popping the nuts into his mouth. Then his green eyes turned on me, focused in the dim light, his glance concentrating as though there were a stitch across the bridge of his nose, then he brushed his hands clean and swivelled the stool casually so that he was facing me directly.

“You’re on my turf, butthole,” he said. “Start it and you’ll lose. Walk on out the door and you’re home free.”

I kept walking toward him and didn’t answer. I saw the expression in his eyes change, the way green water can suddenly cloud with a groundswell. He reached over the bar for a collins bottle, the change rattling in his slacks, one boot twisted inside the brass foot rail. But he knew it was too late, and his left arm was already rising to shield his head.

Most people think of violence as an abstraction. It never is. It’s always ugly, it always demeans and dehumanises, it always shocks and repels and leaves the witnesses to it sick and shaken. It’s meant to do all these things.

I held the pool cue by the tapered end with both hands and whipped it sideways through the air as I would a baseball bat, with the same force and energy and snap of the wrists, and broke the weighted end across his left eye and the bridge of his nose. I felt the wood knock into bone, saw the skin split, saw the green eye almost come out of its socket, heard him clatter against the bar and go down on the brass rail with his hands cupped to his nose and the blood roaring between his fingers.

He pulled his knees up to his chin in the litter of cigarette butts and peanut hulls. He couldn’t talk and instead trembled all over. The bar was absolutely silent. The bartender, the hookers, the oilfield workers in their hardhats, the waitresses in their pink shorts and cut-off black blouses, the rockabilly musicians, the half-undressed mulatto stripper on the dance floor, all stood like statues in the floating layers of cigarette smoke.

I heard someone dial a telephone as I walked out into the night air.

The next morning I drove into New Iberia and picked up a supply of red worms, nightcrawlers, and shiners. It was a clear, warm day with little wind, and I rented out almost all my boats. While I worked behind the counter in the bait shop and, later, started the fire in the barbecue pit for the lunch customers, I kept looking down the dirt road for a sheriff’s car. But none came. At noon I called Minos Dautrieve at the DEA in Lafayette.

“I need to come in and talk to you,” I said.

“No, I’ll come over there. Stay out of Lafayette.”

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t think the town’s ready for Wyatt Earp this morning.”

An hour later he came down the dirt road under the oak trees in a government car, parked by the dock, and walked into the shop. He stooped automatically as he came through the door. He wore a pair of seersucker slacks, shined loafers, a light blue sports shirt, and a red and gray striped tie pulled loose at the collar. His scalp and crewcut blond hair shone in the light. He looked around the shop and nodded with a smile on his face.

“You’ve got a nice business here,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“It’s too bad you’re not content to just run it and stop over-extending yourself.”

“You want a soft drink or a cup of coffee?”

“Don’t be defensive. You’re a legend this morning. I came into the office late, because somebody woke me up last night, and everybody was having a big laugh about the floor show at the Jungle Room. I told you we don’t get to have that kind of fun. We just fill out forms, advise the slime-o’s of their rights, and make sure they have adequate counsel to stay on the street. I heard they had to use a mop to soak up all the blood.”

“Are they cutting a warrant?”

“He wouldn’t sign the complaint. A sheriff’s detective took it to the hospital on a clipboard.”

“But he identified me?”

“He didn’t have to. One of his hookers got your license number. Eddie Keats doesn’t like courtrooms. But don’t mess with the Lafayette cops anymore. They get provoked when somebody comes into their parish and thinks he can start strumming heads with a pool cue.”

“Too bad. They should have rousted him when I got my face kicked in.”

“I’m worried about you. You don’t hear well.”

“I haven’t been sleeping a lot lately. Save it for another time, all right?”

“I’m perplexed, too. I know you’ve been into some heavy-metal shit before, but I didn’t figure you for a cowboy. You know, you could have put out that guy’s light.”

Two fishermen came in and bought a carton of worms and a dozen bottles of beer for their ice chest. I rang up their money on my old brass cash register and watched them walk out into the bright sunlight.

“Let’s take a ride,” I said.

I left Batist in charge of the shop, and Minos and I rode down the dirt lane in my pickup. The sunlight seemed to click through the thick green leaves overhead.

“I called you up for a specific reason this morning,” I said. “If you don’t like the way I do things, I’m sorry. You’re not in the hotbox, partner. I didn’t invite any of this bullshit into my life, but I got it just the same. So I don’t think it’s too cool when you start making your observations in the middle of my shop, in front of my help and my customers.”

“Okay. You’ve got your point.”

“I never busted up a guy like that before. I don’t feel good about it.”

“It’s always dumb to play on the wiseguys’ terms. But if you needed to scramble somebody’s eggs, Keats was a fine selection. But believe it or not, we have a couple of things in his file that are even worse. The kid of a federal witness disappeared a year ago. We found him in a—”

“Then why don’t you put the fucker away?”

He didn’t answer. He turned the wind vane in his face and looked out at the Negro families fishing in the shade of the cypress trees.

“Is he feeding you guys?” I said.

“We don’t use hit men as informants.”

“Don’t jerk me around, Minos. You use whatever works.”

“Not hit men. Never. Not in my office.” He turned and looked me directly in the face. There was color in his cheeks.

“Then give him a priority and weld the door shut on him.”

“You think you’re twisting in the wind while we play pocket pool. But maybe we’re doing things you don’t know about. Look, we never go for just one guy. You know that. We throw a net over a whole bunch of these shitheads at once. That’s the only way we get them to testify against each other. Try learning some patience.”

“You want Bubba Rocque. You’ve got a file on everybody around him. In the meantime his clowns are running loose with baseball bats.”

“I think you’re unteachable. Why did you call me up, anyway?”

“About Immigration.”

“I didn’t eat breakfast this morning. Stop up here somewhere.”

“You know this guy Monroe that was sniffing around New Iberia?”

“Yeah, I know him. Are you worried about the little girl you have in your house?”

I looked at him.

“You have a way of constantly earning our attention,” he said. “Stop there. I’m really hungry. You can pay for it, too. I left my wallet on the dresser this morning.”

I stopped at a small wooden lunch stand run by a Negro, set back in a grove of oak trees. We sat at one of the tables in the shade and ordered pork chop sandwiches and dirty rice. The smoke from the stove hung in the sunlit branches of the trees.